The New Yorker’s theater critic, Hilton Als, published a review of Beyoncé’s Formation album and tourthis week titled “Beywatch.” “The truth is I wasn’t much interested in her,” he writes late in the piece, “until her sister, Solange Knowles, was caught on camera beating Jay Z’s ass in a hotel elevator in 2014.”

We currently occupy an era in which a great many pop artists are thirsting to associate themselves with the latest technologies—Madonna releasing new videos on Snapchat and Meerkat, Jay-Z’s acquisition of Tidal, etc.—with the assumption that these things will make them more accessible to the youth market or, at the…